The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard defy convention: they have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Whatever the label, these evocative images of friends and family and the natural world around his home illustrate a delicate psychology of human interaction. Meatyard was trained as an optician, a profession that he maintained all his life in Lexington, Kentucky; he bought a camera in 1950 for the sole purpose of photographing his first-born son. But shortly thereafter, he joined the Lexington Camera Club and developed a friendship with his photography teacher Van Deren Coke, as well as a circle of local writers and photographers, including Guy Davenport, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and Minor White. Family and friends freely participated in Meatyard's staged and mysterious images, which often involve masks and abandoned spaces, and obliquely reference social, political, and cultural issues. A key subject in Meatyard's work is the natural environment, which is featured in his Light on Water series, in which long exposures seem to create calligraphic texts, and his No-Focus series, in which he deliberately photographed stems and twigs out of focus. In one of his last series titled Motion-Sound, the pictures were made by moving the camera gently, creating multiple exposures of the woodland scenes that suggest abstract sound patterns. The book accompanies an exhibition organized by ICP Assistant Curator Cynthia Young with acclaimed writer and Meatyard friend, Guy Davenport, who also wrote the text. Also included are the exhibition history, chronology, and bibliography.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard 55 (Phaidon 55's)

Arts & Photography

Keller, Judith

Meatyard, Ralph Eugene

Individual Artists

Phaidon Inc Ltd

Rare book of Ralph Eugene Meatyard photos.

The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (Jargon, No. 76)

Photography & Video

The Jargon Society

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American photographer who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. His most famous works involved masks, worn by posing people, or ordinary objects. While he lived his work was shown and collected by major museums, published in important art magazines, and regarded by his peers as among the most original and disturbing imagery ever created with a camera. He exhibited with such well-known and diverse photographers as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. But by the late 1970s, his photographs seemed consigned to appear mainly in exhibitions of "southern" art. In the last decade, however, thanks in part to European critics, Meatyard's work has reemerged, and the depth of its genius and its contributions to photography have begun to be understood and appreciated. Everything about Meatyard's art ran counter to the usual and expected patterns. He was an optician, happily married, a father of three, president of the PTA, and coach of a boy's baseball team. His images had nothing to do with the gritty "street photography" of the east coast or the romantic view camera realism of the west coast. Meatyard took Fox Talbot's "pencil of nature" and drew calligraphic images with the sun's reflection on a black void of water. However, where others used these experiments to expand the possibilities of form in photographs, Meatyard consistently applied breakthroughs in formal design to the exploration of ideas and emotions. Finally-and of great importance in the development of his aesthetic-Meatyard created a mode of "No-Focus" imagery that was distinctly his own. Meatyard's death in 1972, a week away from his 47th birthday, came at the height of the "photo boom." Therefore, it was left to friends and colleagues to complete an Aperture monograph on Meatyard and carry through with the publication of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater which he had laid out and sequenced before his death.

The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (Jargon 76)

Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton

Photographs of the influential Trappist monk are accompanied by his correspondence with the photographer and a brief look at their friendship

Reference

Timken Pub

First edition, first and only printing. Hardcover. Deluxe buckram covered boards, with title stamped in black on front cover and spine and plate tipped in debossed front cover, no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Introduction by Emmet Gowin. Includes notes to the plates. 48 pp., with 32 duotone plates, beautifully printed on fine matt art paper. 12 x 11 1/4 inches. This first edition was limited to 1000 copies.

A Fourfold Vision

Nazraeli Pr